"Maloney, Mack - Wingman 07 - Skyfire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maloney Mack)

morning to come so they could get on with the mission.

Johnson and his second officer crawled under the overhanging branches of a particularly large northern pine, and with a half dozen other troopers, shared a cold meal. The evening was growing chilly, but a campfire was out of the question. This mission had to be secret, silent, and, at least until tomorrow morning, invisible.

"Hard to say just how well protected this place is," the second officer said, scanning the castle with his infrared NightScope binoculars between bites of cold Spam. "I see AA gun lights, and LED's from some SAM's, but they've got a lot of places to hide things up there."

He passed the NightScope glasses to Johnson. "Recon is tough in the mountains," he said with the comfortable tone of experience. "But according to St. Louie's spook's estimates, there shouldn't be more than about five hundred troops up there right now."

The St. Louie Johnson referred to was Louie St. Louie, the flamboyant leader of Football City (formerly St. Louis) who, besides running the largest gambling empire in the Western Hemisphere, also operated its the largest intelligence network.

At the request of General David Jones, commander of the United American Provisional Government, St. Louie had assigned some of his top agents to track down Duke Devillian, leader of the Knights of the Burning Cross, the racist terrorist organization that had tried to halt the cross-country mission of the Freedom Express. Following the United Americans' victory in the pivotal Grand Canyon battle, Devillian had been shot down over Death Valley-by Hawk Hunter himself no less-but somehow escaped what seemed to be certain death.

St. Louie's operatives also had been searching for another threat to the newly emerging American republic-the woman named Elizabeth Sandlake. Incredibly bright as well as beautiful, Sandlake's mind had been forever twisted during the last days of her brutal captivity at the hands of the vicious Canal Nazis of the Twisted Cross.

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Hunter had rescued her, and eventually defeated the neo-Nazi thugs who had used her in their plot to seize control of a world in turmoil. But Elizabeth Sandlake was never the same. She had spent too many months immersed in evil to ever return to normal. The lust for power was contagious and she had caught it. Soon afterward she had set out on her own bizarre quest to overthrow the government of America and turn the country into an all-woman aristocracy, with herself as nothing less than its queen.

She convinced herself that the first step in this strange plan was the assassination of the traitorous ex-vice president. She came very close to completing this act, firing six bullets into the man minutes after he'd been convicted of high treason against the American people.

Captured, tried, and convicted herself, Sandlake was considered so dangerous and such a threat to escape that she was sentenced to serve her life sentence aboard a series of flying prisons.

Somehow she managed to commandeer one of them and escape. It was that plane that now sat mysteriously in the middle of a field on the other side of the mountain.

When all the leads were put together, it was particularly ironic that St. Louie's intelligence operatives traced both Devillian and Sandlake to the same spot: this fortress lodged on the side of the mountain here in the wilds of western Canada.

But as far as irony went, this was only the beginning.

As a personal favor, Hawk Hunter had asked St. Louie to also find a trail that would lead him back to Dominique, and St. Louie obliged. But even the top intelligence experts at Football City were spooked when the twisted trail in search of Hunter's paramour eventually wound up at this same, desolate mountain outpost.

As the first orange-and-yellow streaks of dawn began to edge the blackness away from the eastern horizon, the

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hundred and twenty men of Catfish Johnson's Blue Force expertly linked up with the eighty-five Free Canadians of Frost's Red Force and together they resumed their silent advance toward the base of the mountain.

Meanwhile, seventy miles to the east, on a flat Alberta prairie, the early-morning calm was shattered by the roar of a dozen jet fighters, their engines shrieking like banshees, screaming for takeoff.

It was a diverse collection of aircraft: two F-104 Star-fighters, two F-4 Phantom fighters, four F-106 Delta Darts, four F-105X Super Thunderchiefs. Not one of the airplanes was newer than thirty-five years, and two of the Thunderchiefs were closing in on the half-century mark.

Still, age notwithstanding, the dozen jet fighters represented a formidable force, a fact that said as much about the pilots as the quality (or lack of it) of jet aircraft in postwar America.

There were also two OH-1 support helicopters-code-named Seasprays-taking off nearby. One runway over, a KC-135 in-flight refueling ship lifted off in a roar of dirty exhaust.

There was one other aircraft, sitting by itself on the far side of the makeshift airfield. At a bare-ass eleven years old, the plane was just a pup compared to the geezers warming up a half an airfield away. But that was the least of the differences between this solitary aircraft and the rest of the patchwork squadron. For this plane could not only fly conventionally, it could also fly straight up and straight down. It could stop in midair, go backward and land in about twenty feet of clear space.

This airplane was a souped-up AV-8BE Harrier jump-jet. The pilot standing next to it was Major Hawk Hunter.

The AV-8BE was a two-seat version of the famous British VTOL attack jet that was later built in the USA for the Marines. Hunter had extensively modified the extra large flight compartment, and normally the rear part of the cockpit was jam-packed with his personally designed advanced flight and weapons systems avionics.